Worden Day

American, 1916 - 1986

BiographyPainter, print maker, sculptor Worden Day was born in 1916 in Columbus, Ohio. She earned her B.A. degree from Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Richmond, Virginia in 1934 at the unusually young age of eighteen. She then went to New York City where she studied with a variety of artists, some very well known, including German Expressionist social critic George Grosz, Mexican muralist Jean Charlot, and Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann at his school. She also studied at the New School of Social Research and with Maurice Sterne and Emilio Amero, the latter with Charlot at the Florence Crane School. Other teachers were Will Barnet, Vaclav Vytlacil and Harry Sternberg at the Art Students League. Day later worked at printmaker Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in 1943. She received a belated M.A. degree in 1966 from New York University at the age of fifty.

From 1955 to 1956, she was Instructor of Design at Pratt Institute, and from 1961 to 1966, taught at the New School of Social Research. From 1961 to 1969, she taught at the Art Students League.

By the late 1960s, Day, an abstractionist, had given up painting in favor of sculpture. In 1986, she was given a retrospective exhibition of forty years of her work by the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, but tragically she died of cancer before the exhibition opened.

Day taught at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, in 1949, New School for Social Research, New York City, 1961 to 1966, and the Art Students League, New York City, 1966 to 1970. She won two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships one after the other in 1952 and 1953.

Source:
Jules and Nancy Heller, "North American Women Artists"
Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"
http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?artist=72234, accessed 7.25.2006

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